Leipzig Endangered Languages Archive (LELA)

Background and Policies

Purpose:

The Leipzig Endangered Languages Archive (LELA) was founded in 2005 to offer digital archiving services for linguistic data collected by members of the greater Leipzig linguistics community. It was based at the Department of Linguistics at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI EVA).

Services:

LELA’s primary function was the preservation of digital linguistic materials and the dissemination of those materials to members of the academic community or speaker communities with a valid interest in accessing their content. In this role, LELA allowed researchers funded by MPI EVA to fulfill their obligations to leave copies of the materials they collect or work on using MPI funds with the Max Planck Society. LELA was not intended for creating an open web-based resource dissemination system.

LELA does not archive physical materials (e.g., cassette tapes or field notes). However, in some cases LELA digitized such materials for depositors, thus allowing the content of those recordings to be archived with LELA.

It was the responsibility of the depositor to work out with LELA staff appropriate means for ensuring proper metadata is associated with deposited materials.

Depositors:

Members of the "greater Leipzig linguistics community" were eligible to make use of LELA’s archiving services. This included employees and guests of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI EVA) who conducted linguistic research and linguists based at the University of Leipzig.

LELA used to a wide extend the IMDI metadata standard to organize materials in the archive. This format was developed by the Technical Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen for DOBES archive (later TLA).